Founded in Canada in 2002, Ashley Madison was an online dating service with a cavalier slogan: “Life is short. Have an affair.” A Tinder precursor, the site was advertised as a place for married people to meet lovers (it’s a unfortunate double-standard that there’s no male counterpart for “mistresses”). During Summer 2015, hacktivists identifying themselves only as Team Impact circulated the email addresses of 37 million Ashley Madison users, 24 million of which were valid (including that of The Real Housewives of New York City star Kristen Taekman’s husband). According to Vocativ, the top three nations with per-capita users were Canada, the U.S. and Australia. Citing data journalism purveyor DadaViz, The Independent reported that 86 percent of users who provided gender information were men, who had to pay to see photos of their profile visitors. Tamsin, a “marketing consultant and serial mistress” who is among the doc’s dozen-plus on-camera subjects, says that the gents she encountered on Ashley Madison typically practiced chivalry by delivering unsolicited dick pics to her inbox.

Yet Noel “King of Infidelity” Biderman, the former CEO of Ashley Madison’s parent company, Avid Life Media, would insist that the site’s prerogatives were actually romantic, maybe even good for families. Seated next to his wife, Amanda, Biderman tells Nightline in the documentary, “I see this as a platform to help people stay married.” Aww. “What I’m just trying to do is help people have the more perfect affair.”

For many years, balding and bearded Biderman believed that all press was good, appearing in bedroom photoshoots and on programs ranging from Dr. Phil to The Howard Stern Show (where he judged a Mistress Beauty Pageant inspired by Tiger Woods, to whom his company offered a $5 million endorsement fee following the golfer’s extramarital scandal). The author of Cheaters Prosper: How Infidelity Will Save the Modern Marriage and Adultropology: The Cyber-Anthropology Behind Infidelity even dropped by Canada’s Naked News to meet with a disrobed female correspondent (he wore a pink Polo shirt and jeans). Throughout his media campaign, Biderman always emphasized that he had never himself been unfaithful. In an another confounding joint interview, Mrs. Biderman explains to The View‘s Barbara Walters and Sherri Shepherd that she would “absolutely not” react well if she learned her husband was on the site (adding, “That’s not what I signed up for”).

In August 2015, after Team Impact’s larger second hack included Biderman’s personal emails confirming that he was an active Ashley Madison participant, he resigned. This revelation likely did not come as a surprise to the staff of Inside Amy Schumer, which gave him a dais to annihilate himself the previous April, when he notified pregnant women that their husbands were likely sleeping around. Biderman did not participate in the making of the documentary, which would have been much more fascinating as a character study or at least a deep dive into his pre-C-suite past.

News of the hacks—Ashley Madison‘s expected apex—actually comes before the film’s eight-minute mark. With the assistance of a lisping British narrator, director Havana Marking devotes much footage to getting individual’s reactions, including a white hat hacker in the Philippines who received a small fee for alerting Ashley Madison to a security vulnerability; a lawyer who represented the owner of a site called Ashley Madison Sucks, a man who Biderman bullied by phone; a data scientist who made the discovery that many “women” on the site were actually “fembots;” and a Vice journalist who has corresponded with Team Impact (there have been no arrests).

Somehow, site activity remained robust even after users’s private information was publicized, funneling traffic to the network of Avid Life Media’s less-profitable, more-specialized sites like Cougar Life, Man Crunch, Milf Book, Date Mrs. Robinson, The Big & The Beautiful, Date Broke College Girls, Arrangement Finders, and the also-hacked Established Men. Since some of these sites reference MBAs [“mutually beneficial arrangements”], the film suggests that they facilitated escort services, which are illegal in most of America. In one ad, porn star Kayden Kross introduced Arrangement Finders as a destination for both “sexy silverbacks out there who think it’s time for a little arm candy” and “arm candies out there who think it’s time for a bit of purse candy.” Before his departure, Biderman also introduced hardcore porn to the Avid Life Media umbrella, with films like Screwing Wall Street serving as opportunities for product placement.

“It seems that very little of the Ashley Madison story was as it appeared,” concludes Gina Smith, editor-in-chief of aNewDomain, who has multiple Ashley Madison scenes. I disagree. A man led a company whose services he had in fact tried. A cheating husband felt insecure enough about his actions to tell anyone who listened that he had not cheated on his wife. A very lucrative and controversial business used its capital to launch similarly-veined side projects. And a site susceptible to hacks got hacked.

Smith asserts that Biderman duped the media. I’d argue that he was such a media fixture because it was not only a sexy story involving tons of people, but also: something was clearly amiss. Any host or reporter could have thought they were one conversation away from unraveling Biderman’s philosophy on marital bliss, and his insistence that he was merely a business man, free of depravity.

Biderman’s personal transgressions, plus the expanse and activities of Avid Life Media subsets (the collective venture was rechristened Ruby Corp. in July) are meant to rivet the audience. However, Marking and her collaborators must not think we’re very smart, a point made by their decision to illustrate the press’s swift and abundant 2015 hack coverage, on every reference, with black and white reels of fedoraed gumshoes in phone booths, filing reports to suspenders-clad editors gripping candlestick telephones that went out of fashion in the 1940s. Decades ahead of email, the articles are yanked from typewriters and walked up the newspaper chain of command.

Despite the film’s relatively short runtime, there are huge dearths of meaningful b-roll; instead we see words on the screen that often mirror what is being spoken, or interview subjects completing staged, mundane activities. Many images are online screengrabs, and the overall look of the film resembles a corporate PowerPoint presentation. During a glimpse into a supposed sexting session, the following words materialize, sounding wholly unrealistic unless uttered by Donald Trump: “Do you like cyber? Care to cyber? You into cyber?” The half-baked attention to detail and flippant image placement (ex: cutting from an antiquated newsroom to pairs of anonymous nipples) makes it seem like the film was compiled in a rush, when a narrative with such high personal stakes deserves the utmost care. In the film, Toronto Police Service Superintendent Bryce Evans announces at a press conference that two reported suicides were linked to the hacks. And ‘Jim,’ an Idaho father of five whose face we do not see, still sounds decimated by fallout of his now-ex-wife’s affairs on Ashley Madison.